ESCAPE ROOMS – Prison of the Dead Escape – Pennsylvania

Have you ever had one of those moments where you thought maybe “this is just a nightmare and I’ll wake up soon”? Well my experience at Prison of the Dead Escape was one of those moments and I mean that in the worst way possible.

This experience was easily one of the bottom 5 escape room experiences I’ve had out of the over 200 escape rooms I’ve played. The fact that it’s inside the haunted house is cool, but that’s the only compliment I can come up with for this catastrophe. What was so wrong with it? The hint system aka actor in the room, puzzles and lack thereof, confusing story, broken effects, linear game with a large mixed group of players and all around unprofessionalism.

The puzzles were ridiculously easy to the point I wouldn’t even consider most of them puzzles. Then we weren’t even able to “solve” most of them ourselves because the guard (actor in the room named Natalia) kept telling us what to do next before we were even done telling the whole group what we found. There was another random guy that came in halfway to hang out with her which was really unprofessional but at least he kept her distracted a bit so we had a second to solve one puzzle without her unwanted help. I made a couple of comments about it to her during the game, but she didn’t take a hint…she just liked giving them a lot. There were way too many people stuffed into the game and not much for us to do since it’s primarily linear. A major component in the room didn’t work properly and she immediately explained that the mechanism want lit properly and instead of guiding us gently to discover it ourselves simply told me to put the code in the lock where I was standing. Come on…seriously…she couldn’t even let us figure out where to put it ourselves!?!?! Also if you know something is broken, fix it. It almost felt like she wanted to rush us through so she could go home early. And we did get out with 25 minutes left. Apparently the earlier group got out faster than us. Generally if groups are consistantly beating an escape room in roughly half the time allotted, then changes need to be made. It is NOT satisfying when you aren’t challenged at all. I promise we didn’t beat the room because of my or my husband’s experience because there was so little to do in this linear game that the group of 6 young people we were grouped with dominated and we pretty much sat back and watched waiting to wake up for the most part. (They were very nice kids.) Lastly the story didn’t make any sense at all. We were a group of prisoners trying to escape, but a guard keeps helping us the entire time?

I would not recommend this escape game to anyone. However, the haunt by the same name at the same location during Halloween season is quite good.